Once a week the medical world turns to
the authoritative Journal of the American
Medical Association to find out what’s important
in health care research.
This week, the editors have devoted the entire issue to
trends in violence of various sorts: mistreatment of the elderly,
teen-age murder, battered wives, even violence against public
health workers.
But nowhere in the 90 pages is there any mention of
domestic abuse in which the victim is male.
Strange as it sounds, some people fear that publishing a
study about battered men might shift much-needed attention
away from the abuse of women, the scope of which
researchers agree is underestimated.
But at least there have been attempts to document the
battered woman problem. For instance, a new Johns Hopkins
University survey of 3,400 women published in this week’s
JAMA finds that nearly four in 10 women surveyed in
emergency rooms say they’ve been physically or emotionally
abused in their lifetimes.
Numbers like that are rare when it comes to abused men.
In fact, many people believe that battered husbands are
practically nonexistent. Or they believe that they’re such a
minute fraction, compared to the numbers of battered women,
that they don’t represent a trend that needs attention.

Attack and Be Attacked
But family violence expert Murray Straus says that abused
men do exist, in higher numbers than we care to acknowledge.

“I’ve interviewed guys who have been stabbed by their
wives,” says Straus. “One guy had his teeth knocked out when
his girlfriend threw a brass crucifix at his face. But when you
ask them if they were being beaten, they say no.”
Straus, director of the University of New Hampshire
Family Research Laboratory, is one of a smattering of
scientists in this country studying domestic violence as a
human phenomenon, rather than focusing on the female as
victim.
In 1985, Straus and colleagues Richard Gelles and Suzanne
Steinmetz reported a groundbreaking study of 6,000 Americans
that contradicted conventional wisdom about domestic abuse.
They found that 12 percent of men—and 11.6 percent of
women—reported having hit, slapped or kicked their partners.
Contrary to the common preconception that women hit back
only in self defense, the survey also found that women initiated
the violence just as often as men.
Nonetheless, Straus points out, the men’s injuries generally
weren’t as severe as the women’s injuries.
“Women are overwhelmingly the ‘victim,’ he says. “They
are injured more and are afraid for their lives more often. We
don’t need shelters for battered men, but if we ever want to
stop this cycle of abuse in families, it requires nonviolence by
all parties.”

No Innocent Victims?
Such talk is feverishly contested by women’s advocates, who
point to criminal statistics that paint men as the typical
perpetrators of domestic abuse.
Jacquelyn Campbell, Johns Hopkins University nursing
professor and lead author of the violence against females
survey in this week’s JAMA, points out one of these statistics:
For every man battered by a female partner, eight women are
battered by male partners.
Why such a massive discrepancy in the stats?
Patricia Pearson, author of When She Was Bad: Violent
Women and the Myth of Innocence, explains it this way:
“When battered women’s activists talk about abuse, they focus
on the most extreme statistics, the 3 to 4 percent of domestic
violence in which women are beaten severely.”
Doing that gives us a skewed view of what’s really going
on in families, Pearson says. “We need to realize women are
capable of physical aggression,” she says. “It’s not just a
masculine trait.”
Despite more than 100 epidemiological studies
demonstrating the existence of female aggression against men,
no major government research arm has ever looked at the
pattern.
But as Pearson points out, the fastest growing group of
violent criminal offenders today is teen girls. Given that, the
time to study “battered men’s syndrome” may have finally
arrived.